Prof. Ornella Corazza

Professor Ornella Corazza is Full Professor at the University of Trento (Italy) and the University of Hertfordshire (UK), leading multidisciplinary research on drugs and behavioral addictions. Her work has been published in hundredes peer-reviewed articles, books, policy reports, and featured in numerous invited lectures and media appearances. Currently, she co-leads the EU-funded BootStRap project (2024–2029) which addresses harmful internet use among teenagers and supports caregivers and professionals. BootStRap builds upon the success of the previous European Network for the Problematic Use of the Internet (2018–2023), which established a collaborative framework for research and intervention in this critical area of digital health. Her academic achievements have been recognized with multiple awards, including the prestigious 2024 Innovation and Change Award from the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health and the 2013 European Health Award. Professor Corazza is President of the International Society for the Study of Emerging Drugs (ISSED) and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Emerging Trends in Drugs, Addictions, and Health (Elsevier). Committed to public science, she leads international campaigns on addiction prevention and advises policy makers. She co-founded and chairs the Secretariat and Scientific Committee of the UK Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on “Emerging Drug and Online Behavioural Trends” and serves as an expert for the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in the UK and various international organizations.

This talk will begin by examining the socio-cultural context in which new addictions and new substances emerge. Contemporary digital culture is increasingly shaped by appearance, performance, and visibility. Social media platforms are saturated with selfies, fitness videos, and “before-and-after” transformation content that promote highly curated, filtered, and often unattainable body ideals. Prolonged exposure to this material can intensify social comparison, foster external validation, and contribute to low self-esteem, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, particularly among adolescents and young adults.

Within this environment, the body is increasingly perceived as an object and a product: something to be monitored, disciplined, optimized, and displayed rather than experienced as an integrated dimension of the self. This shift helps explain the growing overlap between image-related pressures, compulsive exercise, and the use of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPED). Once primarily associated with elite sport, IPED use has expanded into the general population, reflecting broader cultural demands for muscularity, thinness, attractiveness, and constant self-improvement. These substances are often used not only to enhance performance, but also to modify appearance in line with idealized digital standards.

The talk will also address how prolonged exposure to specific social media content, including trends such as fitspiration, can normalize extreme fitness practices, restrictive diets, and the use of substances, while reinforcing appearance-based self-worth. In this context, even exercise may shift from a health-promoting activity to a compulsive behavior, closely linked to body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and image-related psychopathology. Results from recent studies will be presented to show the strong association between digital media exposure, self-objectification, exercise addiction, and IPED use. Taken together, these findings highlight the need to understand these phenomena not as isolated problems, but as interconnected responses to a socio-cultural environment that rewards visibility, discipline, and bodily perfection.

• Catalani V, Negri A, <...> & Corazza O. (2021). The Market of Sport Supplement in the Digital Era: a Netnographic Analysis of Perceived Risks, Side-effects and other Safety Issues. Emerging Trends in Drugs, Addictions, and Health, 1, 100014. doi: 10.1016/j.etdah.2021.100014.
• Dores AR, Carvalho IP, <...> & Corazza O. (2021). Exercise and Use of Enhancement Drugs at the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Multicultural Study on Coping Strategies During Self-Isolation and Related Risks. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 648501. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.648501.